Present tele- and data communication systems are a result of a development process since the late 19th century. The technologies of the well-known 3GPP organization are the most widely spread in the world. Within the 3GPP work on standardization the concept of Long Term Evolution (LTE) is well under way. LTE enables a radio interface that is entirely optimized for IP transmissions, thus there is no need for support of circuit switched services. The LTE enables the uplink to support channel dependent scheduling in both time and frequency domains. Accordingly, an LTE uplink scheduler in the base station will estimate uplink channel quality based on so called uplink channel sounding transmissions from the User Equipments (UE) and possibly also on previous uplink data transmissions. Those channel-sounding transmissions are controlled by the eNodeB that assigns each user equipment with a channel sounding transmission pattern that determines when in time and where in frequency each UE shall transmit a channel sounding signal.
However, such channel sounding transmissions consume a significant amount of power from the User Equipment, and causes an increase in overhead signaling. Therefore, there is a need for methods and arrangements that enable a more efficient use of the uplink for channel-sounding transmissions.